A blip between two oblivions--is that all there is to life?
1.
Science still does not know how life began on Earth, but evidence proves that life began here shortly (in cosmic terms) after the Earth formed. Then, after over three billion years of unicellular organisms, bacteria and viruses, multicellular organisms came into existence, during the so-called Cambian Explosion, over 500 million years ago. And here we are, after many millions of years of extinctions and evolutions of whatever life remained after these cataclysms, trying our best to survive in what was once touted as the best of all possible worlds, but what we now know to be a tiny fleck in the cosmos that is, as far as science can tell, totally indifferent to our survival. An unconscious cosmos, has, of course, no interest as to whether we finally get our act together and get along.
Once matter began to replicate, survival, not chance, became the determining factor. Once this will to survival was present in conscious beings, us, we were and are faced with the unthinkable: knowledge of death. A mouse in a glue trap, for instance, will struggle to free itself until it starves; it doesn't know what's coming; we do.
One of the starkest contrasts that exist, perhaps the starkest, is the will to survival, which most organisms share, and the knowledge of death. Some animals, elephants for example, have nervous systems advanced enough to have some knowledge of death. We have seen videos of elephants bidding farewell to a member of kin, by gently stroking the body of the deceased with its trunk. However, this lasts, as far as we can determine, only briefly. The elephant soon resumes its life of foraging, mating and raising young. Only humans, with the most developed brains we know of, know that their precious individuality can be over in a second, and if not now, undoubtedly later.
Of death we know; oblivion after death, however, is something which a great deal of humans, following their will to survival, cannot accept. In addition, mourning of a beloved person is often so extremely painful, that it is psychologically unacceptable. Such wishful thinking such as "Mom is now in a better world," is commonplace. Our instinct for survival has great difficulty wrestling with possible oblivion, either of the individual or of his or her loved ones.
As Nietszche wrote in a poem, "Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit"; ("For all desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity.")
Our will to survival makes this desire universal...
and causes a lot of sadness as well, even despair. For the cosmos seems to be totally indifferent to our lives and to our death'
In previous generations, it was a lot easier to escape the reality of suffering and demise. We 'escaped into eternity' by believing in a righteous God and in an afterlife in heaven. Eternity hovered above us; Aristotle, for instance, Aristotle believed that change only occurred on Earth. The moon and the stars were eternal celestial objects; heaven was often believed to be just above a starry, changeless canopy.
This human-friendly myth began to be shattered by Galileo and others. We all know what happened to Giordano Bruno in 1600 (--He was burned at the stake--why? Bruno spoke against the narrow cosmos of the Church by asserting that the universe teems with life; this outlook posed a threat to the power of the Church, which resulted in his miserable execution.)
We now know that the universe is over twenty billion light-years across; in addition, the assertion that our universe is only a small fraction of the actual universe is largely accepted among scientists today. Our galaxy, 100 light-years long, contains perhaps 400 billion stars; the known universe is estimated to have many trillions of galaxies. In short, the universe is on an unfathomable scale, many orders of magnitude beyond human comprehension.
It is now very difficult to imagine that something in the vast expanse of outer space cares about the vast expanse of inner space of our unhealed minds.
The conflict between the will to survival and the knowledge of death, is, I believe, the problem of human existence. For instance, attempts at immortality by 'lording over' others might be doomed to failure, but are the root cause of a lot of suffering in life.
What is really going on in the universe? We don't really know. Despite our ignorance, however, a meaningful, full life is possible. How this is achieved is the subject of the second part of this article, which will soon follow.
2.
To give the reader a hint of where this article is going, I conclude with a poem of mine, which appeared several years back in the British journal, Verse:
The Scales
What does that speck think it is,
one grain become a black hole
compact beyond the cosmic scale
that tips a trillion stars?
Albeit a very vast bubble
which so very slowly breaks--
What does the world think it is,
denser than its source?
Mere observers find no answer here;
the needle always points to zero
until one puts his hand down hard
on one pan of the scales.
A mustard seed on one side,
on the other galaxies--
Faith or knowledge, I ask you
which one matters more?
Yes, mention of a type of faith is coming. But it is one grounded in experience, and does not flout rationality.
